Map of Liverpool's ocean steamship services, pre-1922. Source: Liverpool Museums Blog

An overview of the shipping companies and routes that connected Liverpool with Luso-Hispanic port cities can help us understand the circulation of people, goods and ideas between the Anglo and Luso-Hispanic worlds. They brought many commodities to Liverpool's docks that remain familiar today, such as Canary Islands bananas, Valencian oranges, Brazilian coffee, Malaga raisins, Portuguese figs, Azorean wine, and Manila cigars, as well as more unusual goods like salted seal skins from Buenos Aires. The docks were also a hub for passenger traffic, including sailors, merchants, migrant, expats, and, from the end of the nineteenth century, tourists.

Ships and shipping lines can tell us a great deal about the circulation of symbolic as well as economic capital. It was very common for companies to choose a theme for the names of their steamships that had some relationship with the part of the world where they traded. For example, companies trading with the Luso-Hispanic world named their ships for rivers, cities, animals and birds. Visit my glossary of Luso-Hispanic ship names to find out more.